Culturally Correct

In reading the chapter on cultural criticism, a few new concepts and ideas were brought to my attention for the first time about a novel I've spent close to three weeks reading and analyzing.  My first good realization occured after reading this passage, "Rather than approaching literature in the elitist way taht academic literary critics have traditionally approached it, cultural critics view it more as an anthropologist would" (412).  This line spoke to me because I took a class on anthropology last semester that I loved, and in that class I learned that anthropologists look to find the origin of both arts (high culture) and those of everyday activities.  In realizing that cultural criticism is all about any action any culture does at any time, with no distinction of class or race or any other possible variable.  I had been going at cultural analyses all wrong.  I always consdered culture in terms of "cultural events" or religious activities. 
Another passage that stuck out to me in the opening piece What is Cultural Criticism?, is on pages 422 and 423, "The future of literary criticism will owe a great deal indeed to those early cultural critics who demonstrated that the boundaries between high and low culture are at once repressive and permeable, that culture is common and therefore includes all forms of popular culture, that cultural definitions are inevitably political, and that world we see is seen through society's idealogy.  In a very real sense, the future of education is cultural studies" (422,423).  I like this idea of studying anything requires some sort of cultural history on the subject of inquiry, whether it be an artist, author, a society, or an artifact.  We, as humans, will always use cultural studies to know more about eachother, and why we do the things we do.
The essay, Imperialist Nostalgia and Wuthering Heights, by Nancy Armstrong looks deeply at cultural studies of the time period surrounding the novel Wuthering Heights, and the different occurences of the time and their reflection on Emily Bronte's characters and their actions.  In her section on Photography, Armstrong makes this comment, "For twenty years or so before Wuthering Heights appeared and caused a minor sensation, a number of individuals in England and France were developing the technology fo rmechanically reproducing images of the countryside and making them available to urban viewers.  This technology brought the more remote regions to the metropolis in much the same way that Wuthering Heights did" (438).  I especially like the comparison of novels, and the written word in general, acting as a kind of postcard for the time, place, and author of its contents, and I am glad to confirm that there are other people out there who look at literature in the same manner.